Preventing Grace
The beginning of the book of Isaiah is pretty dismal. Isaiah spends one verse introducing himself and enumerating the kings under whose reigns he has prophesied, and then he leaps right in.
“Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the Lord has spoken: Children I have reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand….they have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the Holy one of Israel.”
It’s really as simple as that as things stand on Friday night of Passion Week. The average creature in creation–the birds, the bugs, the cattle, even the water and the grass and the sun all did what they were supposed to do. They obeyed God in their own usual way. The sun set, the water ran down hill, the donkeys and sheep went to sleep for the night. But all the people–narrowing the gaze down into the city of Jerusalem–were in a frenzy of quiet, blind, un-understanding agony. Jesus had hung on the cross from 9am until 3pm and then had breathed his last. He had been carefully lowered down and wrapped in 75 pounds of spices and then laid in a new carved tomb. Everybody went home as the sun lowered and lowered and finally disappeared over the horizon and there the city lay, quiet, roiling. The disciples, of course, were hiding together in the upper room, hunkered down, waiting for the worst.
It may not be too hard to imagine their state of mind. They had just invested a goodly portion of the last three years following Jesus around, taking in his every word, believing that he was going to make everything better, suddenly leaving their provincial, narrow lives enthralled by a man who had to be the Messiah. You might know what it’s like to feel stuck. To wake up day after day and never go anywhere new and never be able to climb out from under the feeling of oppression, whether real or imagined. And then somebody comes and offers a completely new and different way. For the ancestors of the disciples, centuries earlier, the oppression had been real, and then deliverance had come, though not in the particular way they desired, running desperately for their lives, a wall of water on both sides, the Egyptian army at the back, fear and terror in every heart. When the various disciples walked away from their boats and their money tables and their lives, they probably did so with an incredible rush of hope, the expectation that life would only get better, that the bad days were behind them.
All that, of course, is gone now. I mean, of course, there could have been Some clues. They were in Passover week, the sun had gone dark in the middle of the day, there was the sign of the blood of the lambs, there was the third cup passed around, the unleavened bread. Or, if that wasn’t clear enough, there was God the Father, audibly praising the Son, telling everyone to listen to him. Which might have caused some dim recollection of another young man, walking up a hill, carrying some wood, being laid down, and the knife being raised, but at the last moment, a ram being found caught in a thicket. But in the of middle intense grief and disappointment, who can notice the obvious sign posts that have been so strategically placed through so many millennia. That’s asking too much.
And what of the rest of the city? Pilate is probably having an extra drink at the end of the long hard day. By the grace of, hmm, Zeus maybe, he has avoided actual riots. Sure, he’s lost to the wretched Jewish Elite one more time. But he managed some jabs of humiliation in the process. He drinks a little more, shoves down the gnawing guilt of having brutally executed an innocent man, and tries to strategize how to get out of Jerusalem for good.
Meanwhile, the Sanhedrin, the Chief Priest, the Pharisees are drawing a sigh of relief, if an angry one. Righteous Indignation, once it’s victim has been vanquished, doesn’t cease relishing the outrage. Blasphemy, claiming to be God. It doesn’t bear investigation. It doesn’t merit digging around the recesses of memorized biblical knowledge to recall, what, the Ancient of Days? The Suffering Servant? The Lord saying to My Lord sit at my right hand? No, that is not worth thinking about right now. What is important is the win. What was that prophecy? Of Caiahphas himself, that “it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish”? No, this is not the time to think of that. Concentrate on the win, however unsettling. They try to go to sleep but it’s a long long night.
What about us, in the hours between Friday evening and Sunday morning? It might feel just as unbearable. We weren’t there. We can only read about it and try to understand, as best as anyone can understand anything.
And what is understanding? When Isaiah quotes God’s accusation, “my people do not understand” he’s not talking about the difficulties of number bonds in common core math, or the miles long maze of the human genome project. He’s not talking about rocket science, or brain surgery, or writing a thousand page paper about semi-colons in Habakkuk. There are a lot of things we don’t understand. Or, some of us might understand some of them, but not all of us can understand everything in the realm of human knowledge. But there is one thing that we are supposed to understand, but that none of us are willing to. And that’s that God is God, and that we are not God, and that, having tried to be God, we deserve the worst. It’s not complicated, but it is impossible. Mainly because we don’t want to.
And so the whole city of Jerusalem, sitting there in the dark, in various stages of grief and anger, are a pretty good snapshot of the whole of human existence. And there we might still be, if, say, it was Thursday Night rather than Friday Night.
What’s the difference between Thursday and Friday? Thursday the Galileans started sacrificing lambs to buy themselves some temporary forgiveness. But on Friday, while the Judeans were doing the same, the true Sacrifice gave himself to buy all the forgiveness that will ever be required.
And this also was a sign post. It could have been seen, because it was just three chapters later in Isaiah than chapter one. And it could have been seen because Jesus said it himself, Three Times, at least. Once for each day that everyone sat there in agony. But the sign couldn’t be seen, because we didn’t want to see it.
Isaiah writes, In that day the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel.
As the sun finally sets on the longest Saturday in human history, the women leap up, grateful for something to do. They tidy up. They gather spices. They feed the ones that need to be fed. And then, in the darkness of morning before the dawn, they set out, ready to cope with the dead. But they also have missed all the sign posts. Should they be hauling all these extra pounds of spices in the dark, to a tomb? The tomb was the first holding in the land. Remember? Abraham, before he bought anything else, bought a tomb, and laid his beloved there to rest. And then he himself was put there. And so on and on. The promised land wasn’t any different than any kind of land. We live, we die. That’s just the way it is. But this tomb, well, the first problem is that there isn’t anybody in it when they get there. The stone is lying on the ground. There’s an angel sitting on it. The body of Jesus, the seed that falls into the ground and dies, the broken shell of the body subjected to death, isn’t there. It is the day of the Lord, and the branch of the Lord, beautiful and glorious, isn’t bound any more by death. The fruit of Jesus’ perfect obedience is that he’s not there, lying cold and battered, but is walking around the garden enjoying the cool, fresh dawn.
Look at what he is accomplished. Isaiah 4 verse 4. “The Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion.” He has cleansed the very bloodstains of Jerusalem, absorbing the fire of God’s perfect wrath into himself. In a few weeks, when he leaves to return to his father, he will leave behind him a flaming fire, a cloud, the glory and power of the Holy Spirit who will occupy each and every believer. For these there will be no heat, no storm, no trial that will separate them from the encompassing love of Jesus. Saved from sin, restored to hope, these, whose names are written in the book, will emerge from the shadow of the upper room and go into the whole world with the strange, death shattering news that one who died, rose up in a body that can never die again.
You were supposed to understand and obey. But you couldn’t. And instead of waiting for you to do that, to get it together, to open your blind eyes and deaf ears and stubborn heart to the truth, God leapt up and did what you cannot do, even to the point of rising from the dead.
And because of his rising, because of death being shattered, it’s power left as empty and hollow as the empty, hollow grave, it’s holding in the land, it’s holding over you is shattered, destroyed, trampled down.
Alleluia. He is risen.
The Lord is Risen Indeed. Alleluia
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